Many businesses and organizations provide call centers in which a plurality of personnel answer calls, such as telephone calls or other inquiries, e.g. from customers or potential customers. Call centers serve a number of functions including facilitating the placement of orders for goods or services, providing information about products or the status of orders, receiving customer complaints or suggestions, dispensing product or technical information to assist customers in selecting or using products or services and the like. Call centers are important departments for many of these businesses and the success of the business often turns, at least in part, on the efficient handling of customer inquiries coming in through the company call center. As such, call center managers are constantly looking for ways to improve center performance.
Unfortunately, call center managers and decision makers in call centers lack adequate information. Standard interactive voice response performance reports do not capture information on usability and lack sufficient detail. Call center managers are often misled to believe that the existing IVR is performing well. Even if they recognize that something is wrong, they cannot identify the specific problems, much less how to remedy them. Without understanding the value of usability and its impact on the business, IVR usability engineering is rarely taken seriously.
Usability design and reengineering know-how for IVRs range from style guides for touch tone IVRs (Hallstad-Nussloch, 1989) to comprehensive collections of best practices for IVR design (Resnick and Virzi, 1995), which also cover state-of-the-art speech enabled IVRs (Valentine and Morgan, 1999). While applying best practices can often improve IVR usability, the measurement and validation of those improvements can be quite difficult, especially in the context of a production IVR with many different tasks and a wide range of callers. When IVR design methods yield different plausible designs, it is often impossible to decide which design works best just by applying guidelines without some form of empirical evaluation.
Thus, there exists a need for systems that allow call center administrators to determine more effectively the cause and source of errors and inefficiencies.